What happend so far!

May 30, 2012

Of course the work for the game didn’t start with our first blog post, so let’s have a look what happend so far.
The initial situation was that 5 master class students of the 3d animation major at the University of applied sciences, Salzburg, decided to create an awesome game for their master project.
We all set down together for some concept sessions, to find a game concept that we all enjoyed. We were lucky that our university provided us with a beautiful old building where we could use rooms for our sessions. Nevertheless, the time in this nice environment was also very exhausting.
Maybe in such an early phase of a project it’s more of a curse than a blessing to have all possibilities and no requirements. On the one hand it’s great to that you can do whatever you want and can imagine, on the other hands it can be quite difficult to narrow things down. We did a lot of brainstorming, wrote down a lot of random ideas, mixed them together, threw them away again and started anew. The initial idea for “The Balloon Quest” was a gameplay idea for a platformer that featured two characters – one moving horizontally and one vertically – and the combination of both of them.
Although we decided to make a platformer game, the narrative part was also very important to us from the beginning on, as a good story and likable characters can support and enhance gameplay and generally emotional envolvement of the player. Nevertheless, settling on a story and even on definite characters was a whole other long proces… But that’s something we will get into more detail another time!
PeterP